A startup founded by Juniper and Cisco alums plans to come out of stealth mode next week with products designed to scale apps from private to hybrid to public clouds, and between different cloud providers.

Avni Networks, founded by Juniper Networks Inc. (NYSE: JNPR) and Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) vet Rohini Kasturi along with 25 other veterans of those companies, is developing products to enable IT to quickly deploy, manage and move apps to and from public and private clouds, according to a statement from Avni teasing the upcoming launch.

Avni wouldn't provide much information about what it's working on, promising more next week.

Figure 1: The Avni Team Good-looking bunch of kids. (Photo from the Avni home page.)

The application is designed to help IT move applications from private clouds to public clouds, and between public clouds. "It's a little ahead of its time," says a former colleague of the founders.

The product is aimed initially at gaming and enterprise applications -- anything likely to see sudden bursts of demand, such as retailers with Black Friday sales, says the founders' former colleague.

"This thing can spin up VMs in seconds," the founders' former colleague said. "It's almost undetectable by the end-user."

Among Avni's customers are SterlingBackCheck, a national background check company, which used Avni to move applications to a new cloud in ten minutes, a process which would have otherwise taken two weeks, Avni says.

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Amazon Web Services Inc. has something similar, called Auto Scaling, to scale applications up and down on demand. But Auto Scaling works only on AWS, not on private clouds or other cloud providers. "It locks you in. You can't go anywhere else. With this, you can scale to your own hardware, and scale to anyone else's hardware," says the founders' former colleague.

Why this matters
While the Avni product is designed for enterprises, there are a couple of angles that make it appealing to carriers as well. Of course, carriers are enterprises too -- they have their own IT shops for running their businesses.

Also, players including Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ), Equinix Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX) and Cisco in partnership with multiple carriers, connect enterprises to one or more cloud providers. Other carriers, such as CenturyLink Inc. (NYSE: CTL), are themselves cloud providers.

Enterprises' ability to move workloads between clouds will make that connectivity more attractive, and help carriers build their own relationships with enterprise customers rather than simply being pipes connecting enterprises with cloud providers.

We'll be curious to hear more from Avni when they're ready to say more.

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— Mitch Wagner, , West Coast Bureau Chief, Light Reading. Got a tip about SDN or NFV? Send it to [email protected].